Teaching Smart People How to Learn

by Chris Argyris

Harvard Business Review: May-June 1991

https://hbr.org/1991/05/teaching-smart-people-how-to-learn

Preamble on Leadership Readings

Writing about leadership is a bit touchy. It has been my experience that whenever I’ve commented about behaviors or interpretations, someone will assume I am talking about them. The truth is, that I am reflecting on my understanding of the world around me. So if this feels to someone that I might be thinking of them when I write about leadership, they might be correct but I don’t mean it as criticism or as a call for some sort of insubordination. I’m just working through some ideas.

my thoughts

Who knew that running better libraries might be as simple as listening to more Michael Jackson?

I'm starting with the man in the mirror
I'm asking him to change his ways
And no message could have been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change

When faced with criticism, the first impulse for many is to go into a defensive spiral. This is what Argyris calls the doom loop and if not countered, it can turn into a “doom loop of despair.” This is bad. It’s bad because it causes smart people to become more set in their ways, disengage, and it prevents learning. It’s hard to learn from both success and failure if you’re denying that you can be to blame. If you’re thinking, “I don’t do this” - well, then you’re doing it. The good news is that this tends to be most profound with smart people. As Argyris writes, “because many professionals are almost always successful at what they do, they rarely experience failure. And because they have rarely failed, they have never learned how to learn from failure. So whenever their single-loop learning strategies go wrong, they become defensive, screen out criticism, and put the “blame” on anyone and everyone but themselves.” The single-loop he mentions is a key concept. Single loop learning is understanding what happened but not getting deeper to then ask why. The double loop is where learning and growth happens. Getting to organizational wide double-loop learning is the goal for learning organizations. To me, this indicates a need to put aside a lot of pride and embrace the fear of embarrassment. I can’t even imagine bringing this up in my current work environment. However, I’m not alone. Argyris points out that human nature is geared against a desire to embrace double-loop learning. I’ll just quote here because I was just continuously highlighting this section:

“There seems to be a universal human tendency to design one’s actions consistently according to four basic values:

1. To remain in unilateral control
2. To maximize “winning” and minimize “losing”
3. To suppress negative feelings
4. To be as “rational” as possible—by which people mean defining clear objectives and evaluating their behavior in terms of whether or not they have achieved them.”

This set of human tendencies really reminded me of my undergraduate education in economics. People seek things that make them happy.

I think of myself as someone who is likely to be engaged in double-loop learning. I tend to fear letting team members down more so than being embarrassed. However, I’m sure I have blindspots. Argyris refers to this as the difference between an “espoused theory of practice” versus a “theory-in-use.” As the names suggest, the espoused theory of practice is how we think and say we behave but the theory-in-use is what we actually do. For example, I think it is important to eat healthy foods and indulge only occasionally and when the food is really good. It’s November 4 and all my Halloween candy is gone… so my theory-in-use is “eat all the candy as fast as possible.” Being aware of this may help me bring my always developing theory-in-use in line with my espoused theory. This can be more severe in the workplace - especially when it comes to my willingness to accept criticism. So, if I can become more aware of my mistakes and engage is double-loop learning, and have a theory-in-use that matches my espoused theory, how to do I help my whole organization achieve this? Argyris doesn’t have the answer that I want to hear even if it true. He says this sort of cultural change must start at the top. “The first step is for managers at the top to examine critically and change their own theories-in-use. Change has to start at the top because otherwise defensive senior managers are likely to disown any transformation in reasoning patterns coming from below. If professionals or middle managers begin to change the way they reason and act, such changes are likely to appear strange—if not actually dangerous—to those at the top. The result is an unstable situation where senior managers still believe that it is a sign of caring and sensitivity to bypass and cover up difficult issues, while their subordinates see the very same actions as defensive.” I’m sure that the awareness that this article has brought to me can be helpful in my analysis of my own behavior and maybe even with peers. However, it is a pretty clear warning not to leave the article under my boss’s door. Argyris does describe some activities for managers to engage in that might help demonstrate reflective double-loop analysis of behavior. He says that making the activities as realistic as possible will help. I hope to be somewhere where I can participate in this sort of learning someday. He also points out that asking for data can be an effective way to counteract defensiveness when they’re willing to engage in learning. This is something I can do with my own activities – I can ask myself to seek data to support my point of view.

In the meantime, I’ll take some other advice from the late King of Pop:

So tonight gotta leave that nine to five upon the shelf
And just enjoy yourself
Groove, let the madness in the music get to you
Life ain't so bad at all
If you live it off the wall

PS - Argyris had this great line which I’m sure he mentions elsewhere in his writing but it is just so foward thinking as to be called out aside from my notes.

“…[T]he nuts and bolts of management—whether of high-powered consultants or service representatives, senior managers or factory technicians—increasingly consists of guiding and integrating the autonomous but interconnected work of highly skilled people.”

from the article

• Most companies not only have tremendous difficulty addressing this learning dilemma; they aren’t even aware that it exists. The reason: they misunderstand what learning is and how to bring it about. As a result, they tend to make two mistakes in their efforts to become a learning organization.
• Solving problems is important. But if learning is to persist, managers and employees must also look inward.
• I have coined the terms “single loop” and “double loop” learning to capture this crucial distinction.
• They (organizational leadership) must learn how the very way they go about defining and solving problems can be a source of problems in its own right.
• Put simply, because many professionals are almost always successful at what they do, they rarely experience failure. And because they have rarely failed, they have never learned how to learn from failure. So whenever their single-loop learning strategies go wrong, they become defensive, screen out criticism, and put the “blame” on anyone and everyone but themselves.
• The common assumption is that getting people to learn is largely a matter of motivation. When people have the right attitudes and commitment, learning automatically follows.
• effective double-loop learning is not simply a function of how people feel. It is a reflection of how they think—that is, the cognitive rules or reasoning they use to design and implement their actions.
• What it takes is to make the ways managers and employees reason about their behavior a focus of organizational learning and continuous improvement programs. Teaching people how to reason about their behavior in new and more effective ways breaks down the defenses that block learning.
• the nuts and bolts of management—whether of high-powered consultants or service representatives, senior managers or factory technicians—increasingly consists of guiding and integrating the autonomous but interconnected work of highly skilled people.
• The most enthusiastic about continuous improvement in their own organizations, they were also often the biggest obstacle to its complete success.
• They projected the blame for any problems away from themselves and onto what they said were unclear goals, insensitive and unfair leaders, and stupid clients.
• When their lack of concrete evidence was pointed out to them, they simply repeated their criticisms more vehemently.
• It’s not enough to talk candidly. Professionals can still find themselves talking past each other.
• The problem with the professionals’ claims is not that they are wrong but that they aren’t useful. By constantly turning the focus away from their own behavior to that of others, the professionals bring learning to a grinding halt.
• everyone develops a theory of action—a set of rules that individuals use to design and implement their own behavior as well as to understand the behavior of others.
• “espoused” theory of action. - But observe these same people’s behavior, and you will quickly see that this espoused theory has very little to do with how they actually behave.
• individual’s “theory-in-use.” Put simply, people consistently act inconsistently, unaware of the contradiction between their espoused theory and their theory-in-use, between the way they think they are acting and the way they really act.
• There seems to be a universal human tendency to design one’s actions consistently according to four basic values: 1. To remain in unilateral control; 2. To maximize “winning” and minimize “losing”; 3. To suppress negative feelings; and 4. To be as “rational” as possible—by which people mean defining clear objectives and evaluating their behavior in terms of whether or not they have achieved them.
• The purpose of all these values is to avoid embarrassment or threat, feeling vulnerable or incompetent. In this respect, the master program that most people use is profoundly defensive. Defensive reasoning encourages individuals to keep private the premises, inferences, and conclusions that shape their behavior and to avoid testing them in a truly independent, objective fashion.
• Because the attributions that go into defensive reasoning are never really tested, it is a closed loop, remarkably impervious to conflicting points of view.
• consultants will perform well on the case team, but because they don’t do the jobs perfectly or receive accolades from their managers, they go into a doom loop of despair. And they don’t ease into the doom loop, they zoom into it.
• As a result, many professionals have extremely “brittle” personalities. When suddenly faced with a situation they cannot immediately handle, they tend to fall apart.
• Performance evaluation is tailor-made to push professionals into the doom loop.
• focusing on an individual’s attitudes or commitment is never enough to produce real change. And as the previous example illustrates, neither is creating new organizational structures or systems.
• How can an organization begin to turn this situation around, to teach its members how to reason productively? The first step is for managers at the top to examine critically and change their own theories-in-use.
• Change has to start at the top because otherwise defensive senior managers are likely to disown any transformation in reasoning patterns coming from below.
• If professionals or middle managers begin to change the way they reason and act, such changes are likely to appear strange—if not actually dangerous—to those at the top. The result is an unstable situation where senior managers still believe that it is a sign of caring and sensitivity to bypass and cover up difficult issues, while their subordinates see the very same actions as defensive.
• connect the program to real business problems. The best demonstration of the usefulness of productive reasoning is for busy managers to see how it can make a direct difference in their own performance and in that of the organization.
• the case study exercise legitimizes talking about issues that people have never been able to address before. Such a discussion can be emotional—even painful. But for managers with the courage to persist, the payoff is great: management teams and entire organizations work more openly and more effectively and have greater options for behaving flexibly and adapting to particular situations.